Lois Landau

This book offers solutions to the *ahem* perennial problem of what to do when your garden goes crazy, or your CSA sends you 40 beets, or if you come across a sale on peas and just can’t resist buying several pounds of them. The book is divided into sections by the type of vegetable. Each section begins with a quick overview: what is a carrot, how do you grow it, how/when do you harvest it, how many carrots make a pound, how to store them, freeze them, cook them, prepare them, and what kind of herbs go well with them. This section is followed by about a dozen recipes featuring each particular vegetable.

When I Inter-library Loaned this book, I was hoping there would be lots of information about freezing vegetables and recipes that could be frozen. There was some information, but not much. I liked it though, and plan to make some of the recipes out of it (the chile rellenos look delicious!).… (mehr)

I love the idea of this cookbook. It presents chapters organized alphabetically by garden vegetable. Each chapter includes notes on growing and harvesting the vegetable, yield information, a few nutritional notes, information on storage, freezing, cooking, basic preparation, and complementary herbs. The freezing information is perhaps the most useful, in my mind. The one truly great piece of information I got out of this cookbook is that you can freeze and then reheat potato dishes, as long as you don't thaw them first; most cookbooks will just tell you that you can't do this. (However, it doesn't give any instructions as to which sorts of dishes work well for this and which don't---and believe me, some work much better than others.

The recipes themselves are all over the map in terms of quality, and lean very heavily on fatty dairy products to make them flavorful--which means that they won't be very useful to vegans or folks on a diet (two major groups of people who are going to want to make heavy use of vegetables in their diet). Most of them also don't use a huge amount of the vegetable in question, and don't state whether they freeze well or not (and if they do, how to alter the cooking instructions for the frozen dish), which means that these recipes aren't any more useful for the cookbook's stated purpose than those in other cookbooks. The only advantage is that in here they're organized by vegetable, and, well, that's what an index is for in other cookbooks. You'd be better off with a copy of the Joy of Cooking--it covers all the vegetables as well, and the recipes are of much more consistent quality.

Speaking of the recipes... Some of the recipes have blatant mistakes in them (like the recipe that called for WAY too much salt--our best guess is that it should have called for one teaspoon instead of one tablespoon). Others just don't taste very good; rarely have I found a cookbook with such incredibly mediocre recipes. Because of the way the recipes are written up, sometimes it's tough to tell which groups of ingredients go with which instructions. Although the recipes look incredibly simple, sometimes that's because they under-explain things or leave out steps.

This book is a great concept, and it saddens me to have to give it such a poor review. But it just doesn't stand up to real use.

Full review at ErrantDreams… (mehr)